Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009) Jyväskylä, Finland Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg, Päivi-Sisko Eerola (Editors) Inattentional Deafness Under Dynamic Musical Conditions Sabrina Koreimann,1 Sabine Strauß,2 Oliver Vitouch3 Cognitive Psychology Unit, Dept. of Psychology, University of Klagenfurt, Austria [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] received the Harvard-based “Ig Nobel Prize” in 2004 for this ABSTRACT work, awarded for scientific achievements that “first make While inattentional blindness is a modern classic in attention and people laugh, and then make them think”, as the “missed perception research, analogous phenomena of inattentional deafness gorilla” setting seems so bizarre at first sight. Still, the paper are less well-known. In music, inattentional deafness has never been quickly brought them real fame via psychology textbook demonstrated under controlled experimental conditions, despite of chapters on human perception and attention.) indirect evidence for related effects. We tested inattentional deafness Most empirical studies on inattentional blindness have been with real music in both musicians and non-musicians. Participants conducted in the visual domain (hence the name). However, listened to the first 1’50” of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra, phenomena of inattentional unawareness are by no means with the experimental group having the task of counting the number of tympani beats and the control group just listening. The unexpected restricted to vision. (For an excellent overview, including also event was an e-guitar solo during the last 20s of this sequence. In tactile designs, see Mack & Rock, 1998, who also coined the Study 1, among non-musicians, only a single person in the term “inattentional blindness”, but usually work with static experimental group noticed the e-guitar, while 52% of the control stimuli.) The acoustical analogy of inattentional blindness, group did. In amateur musicians, results were less extreme, but inattentional deafness, is less well-known than its visual structurally equivalent: When engaged in a simple parallel task, only counterpart, although inattentional deafness in the narrow sense 38% explicitly noticed the strange guitar, with 68% doing so in the as well as related phenomena are quite well-described (mostly control group. In Study 2, findings were extended to an easier stimulus not referring to the label, though; cf., e. g., Wood & Cowan, setting. Results demonstrate that inattentional deafness exists in the 1995a, b, or Spence & Read, 2003, for a multisensory / musical realm, in close correspondence to known blindness effects with dynamic visual stimuli. The striking effects in the musicians’ cross-modal example). Inattentional deafness can basically be group shed a new light on the role of attentional processes in music conceptualized as the opposite of the classic “cocktail party perception and performance. effect” (Cherry, 1953): If the unattended stimulus comes through (bottom-up), we are observing the cocktail party effect; if the stimulus remains unnoticed (although it would easily be I. INTRODUCTION noticed in a non-distracted attention setting), we are observing “It is a well-known phenomenon that we do not notice inattentional deafness. anything happening in our surroundings while being In music, to the best of our knowledge, inattentional deafness absorbed in the inspection of something; focusing our has never been demonstrated under controlled experimental attention on a certain object may happen to such an extent conditions, despite of indirect evidence for related effects. that we cannot perceive other objects placed in the Repp (1996) has shown that pianists’ errors are difficult to hear peripheral parts of our visual fields, although the light rays even for a jury of other pianists currently practicing the same they emit arrive completely at the visual sphere of the piece, as the errors and ommissions usually happen in cerebral cortex.” non-dominant voices, and not, for instance, in the melody lead. Rezsö Bálint, 1907 (translated in Husain & Stein, 1988, p. 91; cited from Simons & Chabris, 1999, p. 1059) Our aim was to test inattentional deafness with real music under more extreme conditions, in both musicians and non-musicians. Inattentional blindness is a modern classic in attention and By definition, inattentional deafness means that striking and perception research. First demonstrated as a phenomenon by unexpected musical events remain unnoticed in familiar pieces Neisser (1979, not using the term yet), it means that if people of music due to an easy explicit task engaging attentional are engaged in a simple attention task, such as counting the resources. occurence of a certain event in a visual scene, they tend to overlook pretty obvious unexpected events of long duration in II. METHOD this scene. The most impressive demonstration of the inattentional blindness effect comes from Simons and Chabris A. Design (1999; see also Most, Simons, Scholl, Jimenez, Clifford, & The gorilla-costumed person suddenly appearing in the Chabris, 2000; Simons, 2000; Simons & Jensen, 2009) showing video by Simons & Chabris (1999) was here replaced by an that people counting the number of passes in the “white” team e-guitar solo intruding several bars of the opening of Richard in a leisurely student basketball scene are often blind for a Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus person in a black gorilla costume walking across the scene, and Spake Zarathustra, op. 30). All participants were presented even beating his chest when in the middle of the ensemble. The with the first 1’50” of the well-known piece, Einleitung, oder effect is so striking that persons not doing the simple counting Sonnenaufgang (Introduction, or Sunrise). The experiment was task while watching the film cannot believe that anyone could neutrally framed as a “perceptual study in music psychology”. ever miss the gorilla. The scenario even works under very The participants’ task in the experimental group was to count “dirty” conditions, as with audiences of several hundred people the number of tympani beats in the piece, while the control in lecture halls. (Somewhat unfairly, Simons and Chabris group was instructed to just listen. The music was presented URN:NBN:fi:jyu-2009411269 246 Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009) Jyväskylä, Finland Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg, Päivi-Sisko Eerola (Editors) from a digital source via loudspeakers, with the e-guitar’s onset not knowing the piece. Thus, the data of N = 47 subjects (age at 1’16” (lasting for 20s). 19-51 years, M = 26 years, 70% female) were finally analyzed Afterwards, methodically following Simons & Chabris here. (1999), all participants were successively asked (a) if they had noticed anything peculiar, (b) if they had noticed any unfitting III. RESULTS instruments or sounds, and (c) if they had noticed the e-guitar. If they answered any of these questions with “yes”, they were A. Study 1 (Main Take) immediately inquired what exactly had been perceived, how it had sounded, and when it had happened (beginning, middle, or 1) Non-Musicians. The results for the non-musicians end of the sequence). subsample are given in Figure 1. The e-guitar was explicitly The counting of the tympani beats was chosen as the mentioned by just a single person in the experimental group, attentive task for the experimental group due to (1) its relative while it was spontaneously noticed by 52% (15 out of 29) in the simplicity, requiring no formal music training, and (2) the control group. This between-groups difference, in accordance with the main hypothesis on inattentional blindness in music, is tympani’s spectral distance to the e-guitar, directing attention to 2 the bass voices of the orchestra. (Remember that the strongest significant with χ (2) = 18.8, p < .001, and a contingency effect in the gorilla study was observed when the passes in the coefficient of CC = .50. team with the white T-shirts had to be counted in order to draw attention away from the black gorilla costume; cf. Simons & Jensen, 2009, for effects of task difficulty). B. Materials The e-guitar improvisations were recorded by a locally renowned bona fide professional jazz guitar player on a semi-acoustic guitar, linked to a standard guitar amplifier (Mesa Boogie, Quad Preamp). They were cut and mixed into a commercial standard recording of the orchestra piece (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, Decca 1994) using the Samplitude Professional 8.0 software. The two versions, main take and alternate take, actually used for the experiment were chosen out of seven different takes which varied in distinctiveness / embeddedness, loudness, and use of the bottleneck technique, based on the experimenters’ pre-selective judgment and a pilot study for task difficulty. Compared to the Figure 1. Results in the non-musicians group. Yellow ... main take selected for Study 1, the alternate take (with experimental group (counting task), blue ... control group (no bottleneck) selected for Study 2 is clearly less embedded and task). therefore has a lower task difficulty. Audio files (MP3) of both versions are available for download for demonstration purposes 2) Amateur Musicians. In the amateur musicians’ group, at the following URLs: results were less extreme, but structurally equivalent. Figure 2 http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/psy/cognition/download/zarathustra/ gives an overview of the experimental data. version_1.mp3 [main take, Study 1] http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/psy/cognition/download/zarathustra/ version_2.mp3 [alternate take, Study 2] C. Sample A total of 125 subjects initially participated in Study 1, with 6 being excluded post-hoc due to not knowing the piece, 3 due to hearing impairments, and 1 due to reporting a result of the counting task (experimental group) more than three standard deviations apart from the group average (cf.